Six years ago, on the night his twin daughters were born, George Plimpton was giving a speech to a room full of dogs.
“My wife has never fully forgiven me,” Plimpton says looking back on it, “but it’s not like I thought they were going to be born that instant… at any rate it was a strange sort of awards show for dogs that had performed some act of heroism… a German Shepherd who pulled a child out of a fire would come out and they would hand a medal around his neck and then he would go off looking very proud. There must have been ten or fifteen of these dogs who’d barked and awoken a house in an emergency or held a burglar at bay.
“That afternoon I began to wonder what on earth I would say about all these dogs and after a while, out of desperation, I began to write bunch of these rather odd letters…”
There are now fifty-something of these add fictional letters from pet owners to anguished veterinarian, collected in Plimpton’s latest book Pet Peeves or Whatever Happened to Doctor Rawff? (Atlantic Monthly Press).
In a mysterious introduction, Plimpton outlines the facts of the case – Dr. Edmund G. Rawff has disappeared, presumably driven slowly insane by the letters strewn about his office. Authorities with the ASPCA suspect they were all written by one person with a singular vendetta or perhaps even by the doctor himself, though Plimpton prefers to let the reader decide.
The author’s favorite letter reads: I have purchased an attack dog who has been trained to attack at the command ‘Wisconsin!’ Since we live in Wisconsin, the word comes up quite often, especially during the football season. Someone will say, “Next weekend we’re going to the Wisconsin Purdue game,” and the dog goes into a frenzy and attacks. Do you know how of any way we can deactivate Wisconsin from this dog’s neural code, or should we move to Alabama? – Perplexed.
“But everyone has their favorites,” Plimpton says arching his eyebrows,” maybe I just like saying ‘Wisconsin’ out loud. There’s something very dramatic about that.”
Though several of the letters focus on dolphins, goldfish, a hamster and even an 800 pound gorilla, a good number involve cats and dogs. There is the Labrador who plays Wagner on the piano and smokes cigarettes; the Bloodhound who organizes a search posse and gets his owner wrongfully arrested; a forty-five pound cat who sleeps on his owner’s chest and whose breath “carries the strong smells of the docks,”; the dog who holds his breath; the dog which might be a cat; the cat which might be a seal; and the man in Duluth who barks and lifts his leg at fire hydrants.
Plimpton wrote most of the letters on airplanes before turning them over to The New Yorker’s Edward Koren, for accompanying illustrations.
Pet Peeves is Plimpton at his most whimsical, though the literary lion and editor of the Paris Review has taken care to include a dog who thinks he is Marcel Proust and a group of chimpanzees at word processors attempting to type the complete works of William Shakespeare.
“They are very strange letters indeed,” Plimpton says, laughing a little. “I was a little concerned people wouldn’t know quite what to make of them but whenever I read them out loud, people seem to just fall over. The response has been amazing.”
A long time animal lover who once wrote an article about polo entirely from the point of view of the pony, Plimpton has fond memories of his two cats, Blue and Pr. Puss, and currently owns a yellow Labrador named Ernie.
It goes without saying, however, that he has dedicated the book to his daughters.
By Thomas Moffett
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