Mister Dog
by Margaret Wise Brown
My wife found a steal at Costco. A package of a dozen or so classic Golden Books bundled together for something like 20 bucks. My daughter has been having me read each one of them over the nights, and some are very entertaining, such as Richard Scarry's book Good Night, Little Bear, but one in particular has me scratching my head. It's like a Salvador Dali/Luis Bunuel movie.
Mister Dog was written by Margaret Wise Brown, of Goodnight Moon fame, and I am trying to figure out what she was trying to convey with the book. Many of the Golden Books come out with some dated storylines and references, and I admire them for their boldness in doing so and still being sold in an age when parents complain about the supposed "anti-Christian" message of the Harry Potter books, or the nearly salty language in the Junie B. Jones series. The Golden Books are by no means irreverent, rather, they represent a time when books had a peculiar imagination and weren't as concerned with marketing or whether the author could reach a mass audience. They're often whimsical and never didactic, which to me kills chidren's books.
The story concerns a dog named Crispin's Crispian, named so, the author explains, because he has no owner. Yes, he owns himself. He has droopy straw hat and a corn cob pipe, and looks like the protagonist of Uncle Tom's Cabin, or at least, Uncle Ben, but images from slavery and reconstruction nonetheless. Not quite sure what they're trying to imply, but that's neither here nor there, because then it gets weirder. First he acts like a poor person/slave who owns himself, standing on his hind legs and living in a house, and then he takes himself for a walk. Suddenly, he breaks character, goes down on four legs, and frolics with the other dogs, tongue wagging and slobbering. Yes, those slaves always reverting to their true selves in the end.
He goes on with his walks and comes across a little boy who also owns himself, in contrast to the dog's usual servitude. Crispian invites him back to his house, and they pick up a bunch of meat and have a feast at home. A picture shows the dog eating 'meat soup' and the boy cutting a steak bigger than his head. That's what makes the scene Bunuelesque - like the excessive feast of the capitalists in the Exterminating Angel. Brown even mentions their fat stomachs being filled. The most jarring part is the admonishing passage about Crispian being a conservative (italics hers) and how he likes everything just so, sunrises at sunrise, sunsets at sunset, and his house always in order. I chuckle because conservative is such a loaded term these days. I expected her to say the dog advocates free market economics and family values. After their Roman feast and over literate explanation of Crispian's character, he and the little go to bed. Seperate beds, because that would not be conservative. No, I don't mean to imply interspecies pederasty (Brown does call him a 'funny old dog'), rather, that cosleeping is such a pinko hippie thing to do.
What is most strange about the book is how the length of the story doesn't feature the conciseness of a children's book, but rather the story elements kind of crash together like a 10 car pileup on the highway. It's meandering. It isn't simple and the concept of a dog owning itself is way over the heads of kids these days. Kids this young don't get self-reflexiveness, because they have to get to know the standards of story and language before they can find something like that entertaining. When you say "that's my dog", or "that's their dog" its really a convenient way of expressing a concept like that. Kids love a pet, and feel attached enough to it to refer to it as 'their' pet, but really they think of pets as another person. Adults feel attached to their pets in a different way, but kids think of them as friends. The concept of ownership isn't even a consideration until they're older. The whole 'conservative' business is equally baffling. I half-expected a footnote at the bottom of that page referring to an Adam Smith essay. Why the author felt the need to illustrate this point to children is unsettling, like it was an apology in the 1950s for their parents being so square and that you needed to do what they say.
Then again, maybe that isn't a bad message. Who cares that the messenger is a surrealist.
