From the Archives: National Pet Day
By HMH archivist Susan Steinway.
April 11 is National Pet Day, a day to celebrate the bond between humans and their animals and all the ways that animals enrich our lives. So many writers have shared their lives with pets so let’s take this opportunity to celebrate HMH authors and their animals. Among HMH authors there are dog people and cat people and those who owned both, as well as those who owned more exotic pets. This is by no means a definitive list, it is rather a celebration of writers and animals and that joy that both books and pets can bring to our lives.
It’s probably no surprise that Rachel Carson, seen here as a child reading to her dog, would be an animal lover. Her life’s work was about protecting the natural world and she is remembered and honored for stopping the spread of DDT and other insecticides that were harming every living thing. And while she had dogs as a child when she grew up she favored cats, seen here doing what cats do best, interrupting work:
Gertrude Stein was a dog lover, and she felt that her dog enhanced her understanding of her work. She and her partner Alice B. Toklas owned a white Standard Poodle named Basket. When Basket died the two women got another and named him Basket II.
Toklas said, “Basket, a large, unwieldy white poodle, still will get up on Gertrude’s lap and stay there. She says that listening to the rhythm of his water drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs; that paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not.”
Animals formed a large part of Virginia Woolf’s life and work. She and her circle often used animal names for each other: Virginia was known as Goat, her sister, Vanessa Bell, as Dolphin, and her husband, Leonard, as Mongoose. Woolf’s diary mentions that she bought a “beautiful cat, a Persian” with the first money she earned with her writing. Alas, there is no picture of that cat available, but there are several photographs of Woolf with her dogs. Here she is in 1926 with Leonard and their dog:
And here she is about ten years later with another dog, Pinka:
Woolf even wrote a book about a dog, FLUSH (1933), a biography of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. Woolf intended the book as a joke, poking fun at her good friend the biographer (and HMH author) Lytton Strachey and she was embarrassed by its success.
Of course, while cats and dogs are the most familiar and the most abundant among household pets, there are those who prefer other kinds of animals. Flannery O’Connor loved all kinds of fowl. She began with chickens when she was five years old – she wrote an essay in 1961 called “Living with a Peacock” that describes how she taught two chickens to walk backwards when she was a child – and she went on to keep ever increasingly fancy birds. Here she is with her ducks:
and here she is with two of her peacocks:
I don’t want to give you the impression that it was only women authors who loved and kept pets, however. Men loved their pets just as much. And male authors, too, had non-traditional pets. Here’s Carl Sandburg with his goats:
Jack Kerouac was cat person, who said of his cat Tyke “I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand and with his little head hanging down, or just purring for hours, just as long as I held him … he had complete confidence in me.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, on the other hand was a dog person. He and his family owned many pets, and he wrote that the “last and the greatest of all the dogs was Trap; Trap the Scotch Terrier, Trap the polite, the elegant:”
Robert Penn Warren had both cats and dogs, although I don’t know if it was at the same time; he looks older in the photo with the dog:
(don’t you love that he’s reading his own book of poems in that photo?)
And I wonder if that is a cat peeking over George Orwell’s shoulder in this photo of him and his dog on the rocky beach of the Isle of Jura, where he wrote NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR:
Orwell was living on a farm on Jura so I don’t know if it’s fair to say that he kept goats as pets, but this picture is too great not to include here:
I love that he is feeding the goat while wearing a suit jacket.
And speaking of elegant, I also really like this photo of Erich Maria Remarque, who published five books and one play with Harcourt during the 1950s and 60s, and here he is with his dog who seems more interested in having his photo taken than Remarque does:
And finally, another man in a suit with his dog: John Dos Passos. Even though you can barely see the dog in this photo it looks as if Dos Passos, like Gertrude Stein, liked poodles:
I hope you have a wonderful and cozy National Pet Day with whatever animal shares your life.
