Dog Days

If the subjects of our early reading determine what we become, I should long since have turned into a collie. As a child in the 1950s I read one book after another by Albert Payson Terhune about the pure-bred sable collies (the Lassie type) he kept on his New Jersey estate, Sunnybank. The books were published in the 1920s but even now most of them are still in print.

By the time I finished them, I had decided to become a vet. It would be gratifying to say that I stuck to this ambition and am now a retired vet, but I didn’t. Nevertheless, for a few years I was keenly interested in everything about dogs and could easily imagine myself grown up and breeding them when I wasn’t curing their illnesses. We had a lovable, affectionate collie at the time, and she must have blended in with her Sunnybank cousins in my imagination. I was just one of the many readers who’ve fallen under the spell of Terhune’s idyllic Sunnybank and its immortal collies. The ‘yarns’, as Terhune called them, were never written as children’s stories and usually appeared first in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal, but children were always among Terhune’s most devoted readers. Albert Payson Terhune (1872–1942) was a literary writer manqué. In 1894, while waiting for an editorial job at Scribner’s, he joined the staff of the New York Evening World – temporarily, he thought, but he was still there twenty years later. Eventually he decided to leave the paper, move permanently to the family’s country home in New Jersey, and make his living from freelance writing. He wrote at the speed of a Dickens or a Trollope, working for eight or nine hours a day, six days a week, and producing short stories, novels and travel adventures, all the while lamenting that he didn’t have the leisure to write serious literature. Terhune had long wanted to write a dog story, but editors repeatedly assured him that nobody was interested in stories about animals, even after the success of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild in 1903. When an editor suggested that he write ‘something spicy’, Terhune wittily asked if he could write about a cinnamon bear. At length in 1915 he managed to persuade the editor of Red Book Magazine to let him write about a dog, and he produced a somewhat fictionalized tale about a favourite collie named Lad. The story was so popular that he wrote several more adventures of the collie, and E. P. Dutton eventually published them in 1919 as Lad: A Dog. This collection amounts to an episodic novel. We follow Lad’s exploits in the prime of his life, but at length he grows old and is nearly killed by younger dogs wishing to unseat the alpha male of ‘The Place’, as Sunnybank is always called. Lad had an acute, almost human intelligence. Some readers wondered if a dog could possibly perform the feats Terhune ascribed to his collies, but he maintained that he never described a dog doing something that he had not seen his dogs do – or at any rate heard of a dog somewhere doing. Besides being big and brave, the Terhune collie, as exemplified by Lad, is male, loyal and protective. He is a four-footed Sir Galahad. He respects children and the females of most species. He learns the Law and is obedient to the letter. Typically he begins as a boisterous puppy and then matures into dignity and heroism. Reading a biography of Terhune, you notice that, by an interesting coincidence, he too was a mischievous boy who matured into the Master, worshipped by his collies. Terhune was a hefty six foot three and had been a serious boxer and fencer in his youth. The dogs, similarly, are skilled fighters, always looking for better bite holds, in contrast to breeds that merely clamp on to one place and then hang on for the duration. A collie’s way of fighting and slashing with its teeth derives from its wolf ancestry, which Terhune assures us was relatively recent. The stories are full of such didactic little asides, some more convincing than others. Lad is described in a way that is almost Homeric. We frequently read of his ‘absurdly small’ forepaws; his coat is ‘mahogany’; he stret-ches ‘fore and aft, in true collie fashion’. He weighs eighty pounds and is immensely strong, having ‘mighty shoulders’. The house and grounds of the Sunnybank estate are described in detail – the veranda, the kennels, the music room, the fireplace and the dog-friendly rug in front of it. Outside is the ‘fire-blue’ Pompton Lake. No wonder sight- seers came in droves to see the setting of these enchanting stories. A few episodes in Lad: A Dog feature the buffoonish but villainous Hamilcar Q. Glure, a satirical figure on a par with some of Sinclair Lewis’s creations. Glure, otherwise known as the Wall Street Farmer, tries to fix a dog show so that his own expensive, imported collie will win it. The Master and the Mistress are morose about the coming defeat of their beloved Lad, but through a comical turn of events Lad wins it after all. Glure, taking his collie through some shepherding manoeuvres, drops his lit cigar on his hand and makes many gestures unknown to the dog, who then patiently waits for an explanation before responding to any further signals. Terhune never quite falls into the trap of anthropomorphizing his canine heroes, although he does endow them with an almost human courage and loyalty. Still, dogs can have those attributes, and canine emotions may overlap with human ones. The Sunnybank collies always remain dogs. When the omniscient narrator describes a dog’s train of thought, it is always limited to the perceptions a real dog would have, and described with the insight of a man who had observed canine behaviour for much of his life. Why is Lad rolling about on a man’s jacket? How does he know that the man at a neighbouring farm is the same one he chased up a tree two weeks before? After Lad: A Dog appeared, readers begged for more stories about the magnificent collie. Further Adventures of Lad followed in 1922, then in 1929 (eleven years after the death of the hero) Lad of Sunnybank. Unable to visit the living dog, tourists came – and still come – from far and wide to see his grave, while clippings from Lad’s coat are preserved in the Library of Congress. By 1937 Terhune and his dog yarns were sufficiently familiar for The New Yorker to run a cartoon in a series called ‘Literary Renegades’ which pictured a tail-wagging collie, a remonstrating Master, and in the distance a woman clinging to a galloping horse. The caption read ‘The Albert Payson Terhune Collie Who Failed to Stop a Runaway’. Now demolished, the house at Sunnybank with its much-described veranda and music room stood for barely a hundred years, but readers of the books continue to imagine it at the end of the drive with the fire-blue Pompton Lake a furlong beyond, surrounded by the forests of the Ramapo Mountains. Whatever the encroachments of high-ways and suburbia, The Place and its collies will always be there, indestructible in a million imaginations.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 53 © Sarah Lawson 2017