My Dog Tulip (New York Review Books Classics)

Although many people consider it a classic (and I too found it moving and extraordinarily witty), "Tulip" has only recently found an audience. The reticence and revulsion that even today greets this little book is usually in three forms. First, Ackerley wrote neither a cute book for dog lovers nor a user's manual; most of the book describes the sex life (real and frustrated) and excretory functions of his dog (whose real name was Queenie). Like Ackerley's other books, this one is intended to shock and occasionally disgust, and Ackerley seems positively obsessed with Tulip`s libidinous needs and toiletry habits--so much so that his British publisher submitted it for legal review before printing it. Second, many of today's animal lovers are upset by a scene in which Ackerley considers killing some of Tulip's offspring. Never mind that he ultimately doesn't have the heart to do it: this practice was all too common fifty years ago, when neutering was not widely available. And, third--and perhaps most seriously--Ackerley certainly comes across as a curmudgeon (if not a downright creep), and his scorn of the "working classes" is harsh on egalitarian ears.

But this book ultimately won me over. From the descriptions of Tulip's inopportune venues for defecation to Ackerley's hysterical attempts to find the proper mate for his beloved Alsatian, the humor, warmth, and playfulness of "My Dog Tulip" should appeal to most readers and especially to dog owners.


NOT for dog lovers   June 16, 2002
9 out of 18 found this review helpful

I was going to get this book for my sister-in-law, but thank goodness I read it first. I found it to be offensive from cover to cover. This is a man who professes to love his dog, describing her genitalia in disturbingly rapsodic detail, and then decides to drown her puppies, because all he really wanted was for her to have sex. This is a man who finds it hilarious to let his dog do her business in his friends' homes. I can't imagine anyone actually enjoying this book. I found it upsetting.


To each his/her own   December 28, 2001
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

All the reviews here, positive and negative, make good points about the book. Ackerley never felt the need to please everyone, and this book shouldn't. I found it to be a strikingly honest account of what it means to be an extreme animal lover (Ackerley thought that the worst thing about the Vietnam War was that innocent animals were killed), written in the elegant and graceful style for which Ackerley was renowned. However, Ackerley never cared about being distasteful, and I imagine that i I'd read the book at a different time in a different mood I might have found it unecessarily offensive, too.


A dark and compelling study of what it means to be "animal"   June 12, 2001
Jay Dickson (Portland, OR)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

The mistake that's always made with this book is to see it (or worse, market it) as a cute little study of dog love--a kind of non-fiction equivalent, say, to LASSIE COME HOME. Ackerley's MY DOG TULIP is much better than that, and it's about as far from cute as you might imagine. Tulip does not emerge as very lovable at all: she barks and rushes and she makes messes and she seems to be constantly in heat. Ackerley's narrator, however, loves her no less for all this, and indeed seems wedded to her not only in spite of but because of her distressing physicality. The point this study is making is that to be an animal--like Tulip, or like her master--is to have a very unloveable body that needs to defecate and mate and bump into things. As we read further, we notice how the narrator's manners are not only at odds with these aspects of Tulip, but also with his own less-lovable traits: his jealousy, his snobbishness, his sense of entitlement. This is, in the end, largely a study of manners--and what manners must conceal in both dogs AND humans. If you take it as its meant, this is a very compelling little book.


"a marvel of brilliance and shockingness"   May 29, 2001
T. Gadd (Tasmania, Australia)
15 out of 15 found this review helpful

In fact that was from a review of some 45 years ago, but it will do for a title.

I think My Dog Tulip is possibly the best book about dogs I have ever read. It doesn't suprise me to see that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Hidden Life of Dogs) has written the introduction to the current edition, as Ackerley opened up some of the territory she was to explore. They remind me of each other quite a lot.

In the first scene of My Dog Tulip, Ackerley meets a little old lady wheeling a little dog around the park in a pram. The dog is dressed up in a blanket and she is cooing to him like an invalid. It's obvious that this highly anthropomorphised canine is the sort of dog Ackerley wants NOT to portray. He commented at the time that he wanted to restore beastliness to beasts, and as E.M. Forster put it, Tulip is 'a dog of dogdom', not just 'an appendage of man.'

My Dog Tulip lampoons the British middle class as well as human anthropocentrism in general. Ackerley's technique of combining shocking subject matter with a genteel, decorous prose style is always a joy to read. It's also definately the main reason he managed to get away with publishing this book in 1956. It's no small measure of the success of this balancing act, that a book which still manages to upset a minority of readers in 2001 was published in 1956 to general critical acclaim.

What you get, if you buy My Dog Tulip, is a very detailed account of Ackerley's life with his dog Queenie (he changed the name to Tulip, only after it was suggested to him that 'Queenie' might cause some tittilation, as Ackerley had been a somewhat outspoken member of London's gay community for some time). At times it is hilarious - never more so than when he's poking fun at English propriety. At other times it is very touching, and at others there is a barely concealed anger against human arrogance. Yes, there are many, detailed descriptions of canine bodily functions - one chapter is titled 'Liquids and solids'. In my view Ackerley pulls this off with complete dignitiy, even if I'm reminded of Salvador Dali explaining to a shocked society lady how he covers himself with filth when he paints, but in order to attract "only the cleanest flies."

When the real Queenie died, Ackerley was devestated, and never really recovered. The greatest achievement of My Dog Tulip is its final chapter 'The Turn of the Screw', where suddenly the style of the writing changes; the comic veneer is dropped, and suddenly all the imagery about life, death and reproduction make sense. Tulip is still with him, but time is against them. It is one of the most beautiful and moving ruminations on mortality that I've read.