Shortly before the American Civil War, English fighting dogs were imported to the United States, where they were mated with native breeds. Dogfighting quickly became a popular spectator and betting sport in the United States, and the United Kennel Club created formal rules and sanctioned referees. Fights were held in taverns and halls, and railroads would sometimes offer special fares to passengers traveling to well-publicized events. The observer of a Brooklyn dogfight in 1876 described its spectators as a “villainous-looking set … more inhuman in appearance than the dogs … a crowd of brutal wretches whose conduct stamps them as beneath the struggling beasts.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, most dogfighters were men in typically macho working-class professions: police officers, soldiers, and firefighters. When dogfighting became illegal in the 1930s and ’40s, it was driven underground, where it continues to thrive, despite its being classed as a felony in all fifty states.
“Let dogs delight to bark and bite,” begins a hymn by the English theologian Isaac Watts. This is the line usually taken by defenders of legalized dogfighting—that dogs naturally exult in their strength and are eager for combat; that fighting, in other words, is “in their nature.” I know there are fighting rings in Baltimore, and I sometimes worry Grisby might be stolen for use as bait. Pet theft is apparently on the rise in the city, though since it’s lumped in with other kinds of property theft, it’s difficult to know how widespread it really is.
Such theft is certainly not as common as it was in nineteenth-century London, when substantial ransoms would be asked for the animals’ safe return. The most notorious of these mercenary pet pilferers was a gang whose members called themselves “the Fancy.” Their modus operandi was to wait until the dog was momentarily unattended, lure the unsuspecting creature—usually with liver mixed with myrrh or opium, or sometimes with a bitch in heat—then shove the poor animal in a sack and disappear into the crowd. When the gang’s demands weren’t met, the dog’s paws or even its head would be delivered to its owner. Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, was kidnapped three times by the Fancy, and each time she unhesitatingly and immediately paid the ransom (see FLUSH). Who can blame her?
Still, when I asked an animal control officer whether I was taking a risk by leaving Grisby tied up outside a Starbucks, he looked amused. “No risk at all,” he assured me, condescendingly. “Anybody that’s involved in illegal activities is going to want to stay under the radar as much as possible. If they wanted dogs as bait, they’re not going to steal one off the street. For one thing, you can just go and get a mutt from the pound—this city’s full of people trying to get rid of dogs they can’t afford to keep. Another thing—if you steal a purebred, it’s probably going to have a microchip and it’s going to be worth some money, which bumps it up from a theft to a felony. Nobody’s going to take those kinds of risks for what’s at stake.”
I felt foolish. When you think about it, the idea of gangsters emerging from the ghetto to steal “our” innocent pets is really absurd; what’s more, it bespeaks all kinds of race and class anxieties. These sensitive issues also saturate the discourse around pit bull “rescue” campaigns, in which dogs are taken from young black men in the city’s run-down neighborhoods, inoculated, bathed, “altered,” given friendly names, adopted by middle-class families, and taken to live in the suburbs. We do to the dogs what we really want to do to the barbarians who breed them: make them submit.
CAESAR III IS a Boston terrier who appears in the short story “Coming, Aphrodite!” by Willa Cather (first published in August 1920 under the title “Coming, Eden Bower!”). The narrative’s central character is Caesar’s master, Don Hedger, a solitary artist whose ascetic life is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a glamorous new resident to the Washington Square boardinghouse in which he lives. The sensual Eden (real name: Edna) Bower is a singer who uses her looks and talent to draw the crowds.
When we first meet them, Don and Caesar are living a quiet, uneventful life in Hedger’s small studio. Caesar, set in his ways, is a grouchy and sullen creature with an “ugly but sensitive face.” People complain about the dog’s surly disposition, but Don explains that it’s not Caesar’s fault—“he had been bred to the point where it told on his nerves.” Every day, the pair follow the same quiet, austere routine. In the morning, Hedger gives Caesar a bath in the rooming house’s shared tub and then rubs him into a glow with a heavy towel. All day, Don paints, and Caesar sits alertly at his feet; in the evening, the pair eat together at the same basement oyster house. For days on end, Don talks to “nobody but his dog and the janitress and the lame oysterman.” In summer, when the nights are hot, Hedger climbs up a ladder to the roof, carrying Caesar under his arm, and they sleep together side by side under the stars.
Eden Bower first appears in the hall outside the neighbors’ shared bathroom.
“I wish you wouldn’t wash your dog in the tub,” she complains to Don.
Until then, “it had never occurred to Hedger that anyone would mind using the tub after Caesar,” but suddenly made ashamed by Eden’s dignified beauty, “he realized the unfitness of it.” Eden Bower, he immediately realizes, is a different kind of creature from males like Caesar and himself. Listening to her sing and play the piano, Hedger finds her mesmerizing. He discovers a crack in his studio wall and starts to spy on Eden every morning when she exercises in the nude. Finally, he gets up the courage to ask her if she’d like to join him on a trip to Coney Island. Eden considers the prospect; her doubt focuses not on Don but on his dog. She concedes, but only as long as Caesar is left behind.
Hedger is taken aback. “But he’s half the fun,” he argues. “You’d like to hear him bark at the waves when they come in.”
Eden knows better. “No, I wouldn’t,” she retorts. “He’s jealous and disagreeable if he sees you talking to anyone else.”
So Caesar is left behind, “lying on his pallet, with a bone” while the couple spend the day at Coney Island. Here, Eden finds herself growing attracted to Hedger, though she’s slightly afraid of his brutality (“she had often told herself that his lean, big-boned lower jaw was like his bull-dog’s”).
When they return to Washington Square, Eden and Hedger become lovers, and decide to open up the double doors that separate their rooms in the boardinghouse. All at once, Hedger’s dark, cave-like lair becomes a bright love nest, and “Caesar, lying on his bed in the dark corner,” is startled by this invasion of sunlight: “the side of his room was broken open, and his whole world shattered by change.” A miserable interlude passes—miserable, at least, for the dog—during which Don bestows all his attention and affection on Eden Bower. True to his name, Caesar III is put in third place. Before long, however, Eden has become such a hit in New York that she’s booked on a European tour, summoned to take up her place in a feminine world of fashion and glamour. She soon becomes wealthy and widely known, while Hedger, the serious artist, remains alone in his creative struggle, uninterested in the wider world. He closes the doors on the sunlight, returning to his quiet life with his dog.
I’m so fond of Caesar that it disappoints me to discover everyone who’s written about this story regards him either as a symbol—invariably “phallic”—of Don Hedger’s masculinity, or as a representation of his master’s artistic practice (unfriendly, inward-looking, a force that prevents wider engagement in the world). I wonder: Why does Caesar have to represent anything? Why can’t he just be Caesar? To me, “Coming, Aphrodite!” is the story