Great Googley-Moogleys! Tiffany Thayer’s most un-Tiffany Thayer-like book is also the one that is most revealing of . . . Tiffany Thayer.
Back in the 1930s, Tiffany Thayer was a bad boy, a writer of slightly-respectable “dirty books”--Thirteen Women, Call Her Savage--although by today’s standards they are quite tame. Still, he had a gift for narrative, and could tell a story smoothly--even as some of his books didn’t show a great deal of writerly control; Little Dog Lost is actually exceptional in that regard: the plot wanders (quite) a bit, but on the level of paragraphs Thayer is focused.
This book was published in 1938, toward the end of his fiction writing career (he spent the 1940s working on the first three volumes of a projected 21-volume history of the “Mona Lisa”; they weren’t published until the 1950s), and when his life was in a bit of upheaval: he had returned from Hollywood, where he tried to make a career in movies, to New York, where he became an advertising man; he divorced his first wife and married his second; he embarked on an odd avocation publishing anti-scientific and anti-government pamphlets. These concerns are reflected in the book.
“Little Dog Lost” is the story of Frank-Stanly-John-Franklin, a man of uncertain origins who believes himself to be something of a Nietzschean superman who is troubled by two things: what he is (even more than who) and how to account for the existence of Woman’s Home Journal (a lightly fictionalized Ladies’ Home Journal). The second puzzle is never solved. He can understand the appeal of any number of other magazines and newspapers--though, like Tiffany Thayer himself he hates them and think they print nonsense in the service of the powerful--but not Woman’s Home Journal, which seems to have no natural audience, the stories unbelievable and unrelatable.
The bulk of the book is spent sorting out the first question, as Frank-Stanly-John-Franklin meanders from Hollywood, where he has become an accidental mogul after being adopted by a theatrical producer--but a mogul who hates the industry--as insipid Eastward, toward his original home in New York. Frank-Stanly-John is haunted by images of his parents, his mother with her throat cut, his dad shooting himself. All he remembers is being adopted by a nice, but poor and plain, family in New York. As a young man, he was taken under the wings of the producer and became his heir. Called Frank by his adoptive family, he re-christens himself Stanly (because it has fewer letters but can’t be pronounced any differently--this is a sign of his vast intellect and perfect logic).
Stanly marries Evelyn, who eventually gives birth to Barbara. Like Thayer’s real-life first wife, Evelyn is a dancer. But she cannot understand Stanly’s intellect. He wants her to work out aesthetic theories of dance, she just wants to dance. Despite their differences, Evelyn “worships” Stanly--this is a bit of a breakdown in the novel, first Thayer’s evident misogyny (women can’t really think, a theme that is repeated, and lightly contested) and the weakness of Stanly’s Nietzschean pose. The book ultimately shows that Stanly is not a Superman, so it is possible that Thayer wants us to see through Stanly from the get-go; the problem is that everyone else around him, and especially women, are blown away by his sophomoric philosophizing. The relationships just don’t make sense: Thayer never communicates Stanly’s magnetism except by asserting it.
And magnetic he must be: on the bus leaving Hollywood, when Stanly’s ditching his wife and daughter--after his wife staged an intervention to stay his melancholy, inviting a priest, a doctor, his boss, and his mistress, after he slunk out of that and defeated the priest separately in a battle of wits--on this bus, Stanly, now going by the name John Smith, meets a member of the criminal underworld, who immediately takes to John and invites him to join a kidnapping. Sure, there’s a slight connection--John’s brother from his adoptive family is a legendary career criminal, but mostly the guy is impressed by John complaining that if the medical profession weren’t a racket, doctors would have cured all known diseases by now. Hardly heady stuff.
The job in Kansas City gets complicated by a barber who had followed John from Hollywood to win his way into pictures. John is nonplussed. He hates Hollywood and first thinks kidnapping more honorable--because a man stands or falls on the quality of his own work--before realizing that kidnappers prey on the weakness of human emotions (blinding insight, that!) and, second, that barbering a better trade because the skill can be carried anywhere, a barber not tied to anyone or anything. The toughs get concerned about the barber, thinking him a G-man and John a stoolly; they set out to kill the barber and John to save him, only to end up in a shoot out with real government agents who had been following John in order to find his brother.
Here is another problem with the book: the melodrama starts to pile up. Not only do the G-men save John and the barber, John saves the life of one of them, Red, who then follows John to his next destination, Cincinnati, further hoping to find the great thief Peter. To this point, John had been idly playing with the idea of starting his own newspaper, one that printed logical stories, the truth, and in service of that he went to a local newspaper to start making connections. There he met Grace Morgan, a much younger journalist--she’s in her early twenties, John is somewhere around forty, though the way Thayer writes it (and at them time Thayer was thirty-five, looking at his forties), John is ancient. He knows he can seduce her, momentarily wonders about the vast age difference, then goes ahead and does it, becoming a kept man for several weeks. Supposedly to his credit, though, he warns her that he is a “moral leper” since e does not live by society’s conventions, but by objective ones. She doesn’t care.
“‘Oh, John,’ said she, ‘do you always--have you always taken such pains to be a fine lover. Is this your way with all women?’”
Uh-huh.
At any rate, he gets fed up with this arrangement--although, from a reader’s point of view, it takes him a bit too long. Thayer has a gift for narrative, no doubt, but he is too infatuated with it, like late Stephen King, and this section really drags. It’s what kept me continually setting the book aside. John cooks up an argument--Grace has accidentally brought home a newspaper, and he makes fun of its stupidity, getting so angry to storm out and leave her. She imagines he will be back; he knows better. You see, John has been working with an employment agency, and has so impressed one man that he is hired as a private investigator (disguised as the chief janitor) to look into communist agitation at a college in a small Ohio town. It just so happens, of course--melodrama--that this is the same college attended by Grace’s (kind-of) fiancé, who is experiencing a crisis of faith.
John takes the job, but is distracted by a twelve year old girl who shares with him an intense skepticism and disdain for convention. She is the prodigious daughter of an anthropologist professor and Christian mother, but shares neither of their biases, not a Darwinian nor a fundamentalist. John has immodest fantasies about stealing away with her--but only to study, to study! Despite the distraction provided by Doris (and her family, which regularly holds salons to discuss topics of the day, Christian ones on Friday, secular ones on Monday) John gets the goods on the economics professor spreading communist propaganda. He also deals with Grace, who has found his whereabouts--and is at first sure it is because John, in contradistinction to everything she knows about him--is jealous of her fiancé and then, after finding copies of New Masses in his room, that John is himself a Red.
He puts her off, incidentally solving her fiancé Abel’s spiritual crisis. Abel was the son of a Presbyterian minister, but had lost his faith while in college, and was now afraid his dad would cut off funding his education. He had written a letter explaining himself, but could not send it, instead asking for opinions from Doris’s father, from Grace, and from John--on the very night he accused John of making time with Grace. John easily convinced Abel to give him the original of the letter and, without Abel knowing, mailed it off. (Abel’s dad ended up being all right with his son’s apostasy.) After all that melodrama, John’s magnetism was still evident, and he convinced Grace not to expose him: a better story was available.
The economics professor was convening a meeting of communists, John was invited, and he told Grace of it. Every thread of the story comes together through pure coincidence. John’s brother Peter, the career criminal is there; and the speaker is a communist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Peter tells John, that man is his real father. The G-men who had been tailing John show up, and start a fight. John tries to spirit Peter out, but Peter is shot; John takes up Peter’s gun and shoots blindly, then runs off to Doris’s family.
John had become disgusted with Doris because she had shown the inclinations of a 12 year old girl: she liked a boy her age, and especially his new puppy. How could this be? Now, in a haze, John hears the boy looking for his dog, little dog lost. The pathos breaks him: he realizes that his egotism has been a defense for his extreme sympathy. The police arrest him, and the newly vulnerable John gets a chance to speak with his father, who returns at John’s request,and learn about himself and find a future.
John learns that he is the bastard child of the the colonel and his mother; his mother’s husband found out, became enraged, and killed her, then himself. John was left an orphan. His real name, like his biological father’s, was Franklin. (That was also Peter’s real name: Peter was the son of the colonel and the colonel’s wife.) And John learns that his father’s not really a communist--communism, John thinks, and unions, are just a protection racket for the incompetent. John’s father wants to enlighten them masses, not educate them:
“The air over their heads has been filled with a terrible, jealous God! The rock under their feet has been melted into a fiery pit yawning for them. The food they eat has been filled with a mystical nothing called vitamins. Their eyes have been dazzled with uniforms and simpering dolls on spools of celluloid. Their ears have been filled with saxophone moans and radio baby-talk. Their feet have been taught to tap out infantile rhythms. Their hearts have been torn from their breasts and sold as greeting cards. Their penuses [sic] have been daubed with pitch and slime by moralists to make them odious and disgusting. And into the pores of their bodies a filmy, intangibility called a ‘soul’ has been injected. In the name of reason, my boy, what do you expect to find in their heads? How could they possibly think? When do they have time to think?”
John sees such an act as the true fulfillment of Nietzsche’s call to “live dangerously.” His is the minority opinion, he knows, but if he lives his ideals--without insisting everyone else do the same--he can be a “fig for posterity,” an emblem for the world to look back to when it realizes his ideals are the just ones.
His father, incidentally an old advertising man himself, brags that he could reach the masses and bring them true enlightenment: “Give me a broadcasting station and a battery of color presses and I’ll show you a miracle in ten years.” His dad, too, wants to put out an independent newspaper, one that pokes holes in modern conventions. John knows just what to do: he has money to start such an operation. Grace is a reporter and Doris brilliant, so he has staff. He tells his dad to do so, but he wants to wait in the hospital for the next ten years and come out when the world is better, or at least close to better. He needs the rest.
The autobiographical elements are clearly here, though remixed, and it is difficult not to read the book as Thayer appeasing himself for the gradual descent into a life he never meant--becoming an advertising man, leaving the arts, leaving his first wife. Read that way, the book is very interesting. Read as an egoist manifesto, not so much: it’s more like a combination of mid-life crisis story mixed with adolescent existentialism--I guess you could read it as “The Corrections” of the 1930s.
But there is one final irony, one that Thayer could not have anticipated when writing the novel. In 1938, he imagined life in an asylum as a welcome refuge from the demands of an insipid world. Seven years later, Ezra Pound was brought to the United States and, according to wikipedia, was thought to be “an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives.” He was put into an asylum. Thayer was a huge fan of Pound , and spent the rest of his life incensed at the injustice of Pound’s imprisonment, offering him support (he even bought Pound underwear) and trying to rally friends to protest.
Back in the 1930s, Tiffany Thayer was a bad boy, a writer of slightly-respectable “dirty books”--Thirteen Women, Call Her Savage--although by today’s standards they are quite tame. Still, he had a gift for narrative, and could tell a story smoothly--even as some of his books didn’t show a great deal of writerly control; Little Dog Lost is actually exceptional in that regard: the plot wanders (quite) a bit, but on the level of paragraphs Thayer is focused.
This book was published in 1938, toward the end of his fiction writing career (he spent the 1940s working on the first three volumes of a projected 21-volume history of the “Mona Lisa”; they weren’t published until the 1950s), and when his life was in a bit of upheaval: he had returned from Hollywood, where he tried to make a career in movies, to New York, where he became an advertising man; he divorced his first wife and married his second; he embarked on an odd avocation publishing anti-scientific and anti-government pamphlets. These concerns are reflected in the book.
“Little Dog Lost” is the story of Frank-Stanly-John-Franklin, a man of uncertain origins who believes himself to be something of a Nietzschean superman who is troubled by two things: what he is (even more than who) and how to account for the existence of Woman’s Home Journal (a lightly fictionalized Ladies’ Home Journal). The second puzzle is never solved. He can understand the appeal of any number of other magazines and newspapers--though, like Tiffany Thayer himself he hates them and think they print nonsense in the service of the powerful--but not Woman’s Home Journal, which seems to have no natural audience, the stories unbelievable and unrelatable.
The bulk of the book is spent sorting out the first question, as Frank-Stanly-John-Franklin meanders from Hollywood, where he has become an accidental mogul after being adopted by a theatrical producer--but a mogul who hates the industry--as insipid Eastward, toward his original home in New York. Frank-Stanly-John is haunted by images of his parents, his mother with her throat cut, his dad shooting himself. All he remembers is being adopted by a nice, but poor and plain, family in New York. As a young man, he was taken under the wings of the producer and became his heir. Called Frank by his adoptive family, he re-christens himself Stanly (because it has fewer letters but can’t be pronounced any differently--this is a sign of his vast intellect and perfect logic).
Stanly marries Evelyn, who eventually gives birth to Barbara. Like Thayer’s real-life first wife, Evelyn is a dancer. But she cannot understand Stanly’s intellect. He wants her to work out aesthetic theories of dance, she just wants to dance. Despite their differences, Evelyn “worships” Stanly--this is a bit of a breakdown in the novel, first Thayer’s evident misogyny (women can’t really think, a theme that is repeated, and lightly contested) and the weakness of Stanly’s Nietzschean pose. The book ultimately shows that Stanly is not a Superman, so it is possible that Thayer wants us to see through Stanly from the get-go; the problem is that everyone else around him, and especially women, are blown away by his sophomoric philosophizing. The relationships just don’t make sense: Thayer never communicates Stanly’s magnetism except by asserting it.
And magnetic he must be: on the bus leaving Hollywood, when Stanly’s ditching his wife and daughter--after his wife staged an intervention to stay his melancholy, inviting a priest, a doctor, his boss, and his mistress, after he slunk out of that and defeated the priest separately in a battle of wits--on this bus, Stanly, now going by the name John Smith, meets a member of the criminal underworld, who immediately takes to John and invites him to join a kidnapping. Sure, there’s a slight connection--John’s brother from his adoptive family is a legendary career criminal, but mostly the guy is impressed by John complaining that if the medical profession weren’t a racket, doctors would have cured all known diseases by now. Hardly heady stuff.
The job in Kansas City gets complicated by a barber who had followed John from Hollywood to win his way into pictures. John is nonplussed. He hates Hollywood and first thinks kidnapping more honorable--because a man stands or falls on the quality of his own work--before realizing that kidnappers prey on the weakness of human emotions (blinding insight, that!) and, second, that barbering a better trade because the skill can be carried anywhere, a barber not tied to anyone or anything. The toughs get concerned about the barber, thinking him a G-man and John a stoolly; they set out to kill the barber and John to save him, only to end up in a shoot out with real government agents who had been following John in order to find his brother.
Here is another problem with the book: the melodrama starts to pile up. Not only do the G-men save John and the barber, John saves the life of one of them, Red, who then follows John to his next destination, Cincinnati, further hoping to find the great thief Peter. To this point, John had been idly playing with the idea of starting his own newspaper, one that printed logical stories, the truth, and in service of that he went to a local newspaper to start making connections. There he met Grace Morgan, a much younger journalist--she’s in her early twenties, John is somewhere around forty, though the way Thayer writes it (and at them time Thayer was thirty-five, looking at his forties), John is ancient. He knows he can seduce her, momentarily wonders about the vast age difference, then goes ahead and does it, becoming a kept man for several weeks. Supposedly to his credit, though, he warns her that he is a “moral leper” since e does not live by society’s conventions, but by objective ones. She doesn’t care.
“‘Oh, John,’ said she, ‘do you always--have you always taken such pains to be a fine lover. Is this your way with all women?’”
Uh-huh.
At any rate, he gets fed up with this arrangement--although, from a reader’s point of view, it takes him a bit too long. Thayer has a gift for narrative, no doubt, but he is too infatuated with it, like late Stephen King, and this section really drags. It’s what kept me continually setting the book aside. John cooks up an argument--Grace has accidentally brought home a newspaper, and he makes fun of its stupidity, getting so angry to storm out and leave her. She imagines he will be back; he knows better. You see, John has been working with an employment agency, and has so impressed one man that he is hired as a private investigator (disguised as the chief janitor) to look into communist agitation at a college in a small Ohio town. It just so happens, of course--melodrama--that this is the same college attended by Grace’s (kind-of) fiancé, who is experiencing a crisis of faith.
John takes the job, but is distracted by a twelve year old girl who shares with him an intense skepticism and disdain for convention. She is the prodigious daughter of an anthropologist professor and Christian mother, but shares neither of their biases, not a Darwinian nor a fundamentalist. John has immodest fantasies about stealing away with her--but only to study, to study! Despite the distraction provided by Doris (and her family, which regularly holds salons to discuss topics of the day, Christian ones on Friday, secular ones on Monday) John gets the goods on the economics professor spreading communist propaganda. He also deals with Grace, who has found his whereabouts--and is at first sure it is because John, in contradistinction to everything she knows about him--is jealous of her fiancé and then, after finding copies of New Masses in his room, that John is himself a Red.
He puts her off, incidentally solving her fiancé Abel’s spiritual crisis. Abel was the son of a Presbyterian minister, but had lost his faith while in college, and was now afraid his dad would cut off funding his education. He had written a letter explaining himself, but could not send it, instead asking for opinions from Doris’s father, from Grace, and from John--on the very night he accused John of making time with Grace. John easily convinced Abel to give him the original of the letter and, without Abel knowing, mailed it off. (Abel’s dad ended up being all right with his son’s apostasy.) After all that melodrama, John’s magnetism was still evident, and he convinced Grace not to expose him: a better story was available.
The economics professor was convening a meeting of communists, John was invited, and he told Grace of it. Every thread of the story comes together through pure coincidence. John’s brother Peter, the career criminal is there; and the speaker is a communist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Peter tells John, that man is his real father. The G-men who had been tailing John show up, and start a fight. John tries to spirit Peter out, but Peter is shot; John takes up Peter’s gun and shoots blindly, then runs off to Doris’s family.
John had become disgusted with Doris because she had shown the inclinations of a 12 year old girl: she liked a boy her age, and especially his new puppy. How could this be? Now, in a haze, John hears the boy looking for his dog, little dog lost. The pathos breaks him: he realizes that his egotism has been a defense for his extreme sympathy. The police arrest him, and the newly vulnerable John gets a chance to speak with his father, who returns at John’s request,and learn about himself and find a future.
John learns that he is the bastard child of the the colonel and his mother; his mother’s husband found out, became enraged, and killed her, then himself. John was left an orphan. His real name, like his biological father’s, was Franklin. (That was also Peter’s real name: Peter was the son of the colonel and the colonel’s wife.) And John learns that his father’s not really a communist--communism, John thinks, and unions, are just a protection racket for the incompetent. John’s father wants to enlighten them masses, not educate them:
“The air over their heads has been filled with a terrible, jealous God! The rock under their feet has been melted into a fiery pit yawning for them. The food they eat has been filled with a mystical nothing called vitamins. Their eyes have been dazzled with uniforms and simpering dolls on spools of celluloid. Their ears have been filled with saxophone moans and radio baby-talk. Their feet have been taught to tap out infantile rhythms. Their hearts have been torn from their breasts and sold as greeting cards. Their penuses [sic] have been daubed with pitch and slime by moralists to make them odious and disgusting. And into the pores of their bodies a filmy, intangibility called a ‘soul’ has been injected. In the name of reason, my boy, what do you expect to find in their heads? How could they possibly think? When do they have time to think?”
John sees such an act as the true fulfillment of Nietzsche’s call to “live dangerously.” His is the minority opinion, he knows, but if he lives his ideals--without insisting everyone else do the same--he can be a “fig for posterity,” an emblem for the world to look back to when it realizes his ideals are the just ones.
His father, incidentally an old advertising man himself, brags that he could reach the masses and bring them true enlightenment: “Give me a broadcasting station and a battery of color presses and I’ll show you a miracle in ten years.” His dad, too, wants to put out an independent newspaper, one that pokes holes in modern conventions. John knows just what to do: he has money to start such an operation. Grace is a reporter and Doris brilliant, so he has staff. He tells his dad to do so, but he wants to wait in the hospital for the next ten years and come out when the world is better, or at least close to better. He needs the rest.
The autobiographical elements are clearly here, though remixed, and it is difficult not to read the book as Thayer appeasing himself for the gradual descent into a life he never meant--becoming an advertising man, leaving the arts, leaving his first wife. Read that way, the book is very interesting. Read as an egoist manifesto, not so much: it’s more like a combination of mid-life crisis story mixed with adolescent existentialism--I guess you could read it as “The Corrections” of the 1930s.
But there is one final irony, one that Thayer could not have anticipated when writing the novel. In 1938, he imagined life in an asylum as a welcome refuge from the demands of an insipid world. Seven years later, Ezra Pound was brought to the United States and, according to wikipedia, was thought to be “an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives.” He was put into an asylum. Thayer was a huge fan of Pound , and spent the rest of his life incensed at the injustice of Pound’s imprisonment, offering him support (he even bought Pound underwear) and trying to rally friends to protest.
