Reading is Writing #11: A barbecue of dogs, hogs and wives
Brad Watson's barbecue from hell, featuring lawyers, cannibals and a UPS crate.
Some weeks are easier than others when it comes to writing the introductory portion of an essay. And this week I was covering a conference, which means in short order I was stuck in an airport for four hours; on a tarmac for two; saw more lightning than I have ever seen before, red at a distance of a hundred miles, colorless a few miles off, and a poisonous blue when streaking by the plane itself; worked four back-to-back 14 hour days, walking 10 miles each day; interviewed dozens of people; ate enough junk food to cure myself forever of childish cravings for baked goods and fast food; stayed in a haunted hotel (doors opened and closed on their own; I found abandoned corridors and staterooms padlocked shut from the outside; heard screaming in the elevators*); lost and regained my wallet; and turned 28.
Which means that I have not had the time to write either a proper introduction or a fun little essay for this piece. That’s a shame because this piece requires a little introduction, and I haven’t done a final copy edit on it.
This is my semester-ending critical paper for Bennington College’s MFA program. It began with my review of Brad Watson’s Last Days of the Dog Men, which ran on this blog some time ago. It is, however, much different from that initial essay. For starters, it is about thrice the length, and it discusses different stories towards a different end. It is more technical and a bit more referential as well. But you’ll see all that for yourself. I want to talk a little about Watson’s place in American letters and why I have chosen to focus so much attention on a short story collection that no one on social media seems to care much about at all and which will certainly not result in one of those half-LinkedIn speak viral Substack essays everyone rails against but won’t stop reading.
Brad Watson died young. At least for an American of his generation, who might’ve expected, having reached his mid-60s, to live another 15-20 years from an actuarial perspective. There is a sense of something unfinished in his career and the insufficient recognition which was paid to him. Sometimes being good—very good—is not enough.
And he was a writer from the south. The prose of his that I have read falls in the register some people call “masculine,” when really they mean restrained. Watson was an economical writer, and he knew when to use the emblems of his region for good effect, playing in the dark fantasy many readers have of Southron stories. His stories, because of this restraint, are smarter than they seem at the surface level, their irony and comment reserved for the situation: Lawyers confessing murder, wayward lovers returning by mail, dogs that die like men and men who live like dogs.
All stories, except the perfect and the very bad, are self-conscious. Many of the great aesthetic movements of the last two hundred years have played with that self-consciousness: Formalism, Surrealism, Existentialism, high Modernism and Romanticism all depend to some degree on the book acknowledging itself as text. Yet the great writers, and I do think Watson was great, can make that self-consciousness work at the level of structure and leave it invisible at the level of the sentence. This then is realistic fiction, a work aware of its own life but not preoccupied by it, confident in itself. Watson, who neither refused nor fetishized the literary heritage of the South, was a great writer in that way.
There is no need to wink here, the work is good enough.
So let’s get into it. But first, if you want to support my literary education, subscribe here or upgrade your subscription.
Critical Paper:
Each story in Brad Watson’s 1996 collection Last Days of the Dog-Men centers on the relationships between dogs and people. But within that rather broad framework, several stories use dogs and the death of dogs as symbols for the deterioration of marriages/heterosexual partnerships. Watson’s use of dogs as a marriage symbol becomes more complex across the collection. Watson begins with a straightforward dog’s death standing in for the irreparable destruction of a marriage in the eponymous “Last Days of the Dog-Men.” He complicates the dog-marriage symbol in “The Wake,” where a dog’s death symbolizes both a man’s grief at the end of his relationship, and the possibility of reunion. And in the final story of the collection, “Kindred Spirits,” a woman and her lover are murdered and, in separate instances, a dog is drowned by another dog—its son—while a man nearly shoots his own son, and a hunting dog is shot and killed. The parallels between men and dogs in “Kindred Spirits” are particularly obvious, but they resist easy interpretation using the symbolic language Watson has developed over the course of the collection.
Dog as marriage stand-in
The dead dog in the first story is a retired racing greyhound, Spike, and the woman who kills him is Lois, the wife of the narrator of the story. Lois has Spike put down as her marriage to the narrator disintegrates—the narrator cheated on her, and was caught by Lois. Spike was present when he was caught. Lois had got the dog as a companion for her husband, and the narrator begins his affair with a neighbor whom he meets while running with Spike. In this sense, Spike owes his presence to Lois’ effort to sort out a malaise in her marriage and reestablish a connection with her husband, the narrator: “things had become distant in the way they do after a marriage struggles through passionate possessive love and into the heartbreak of languishing love, before the vague incestuous love of the long-together.” (27).
But the gesture of connection literally draws the narrator out of the house, out of the marriage. After he is caught by Lois, Spike comes to represent the possibility of domestic tranquility. The narrator finds Spike asleep on the bed the night his affair has been discovered: “I don’t imagine I’d have had the courage to climb into bed and beg forgiveness, anyway. But seeing Spike already there made things clearer, and I crept back out to the den and onto the couch.” (29). The next day, Lois takes Spike to the vet and has him put down.
Spike’s death is a moment of heightened reality. Watson’s work carries certain gothic sensibilities, though it is typical for Yankees to say this of southern writers, but his stories are stranger and sadder than one would assume of mimetically real stories. Though, in a 2010 Q&A with W.W. Norton Watson said: “I’m a realist but I want the real to seem very strange, because I think it is.” So it’s possible that as a bourgeois Yankee, I am again assigning to Watson a role he tried consciously to avoid. Equally, I am sure, some of my personal experiences would seem absurd and non-mimetic when written down. I once knew a kid who called himself “The Illusive Gossamer,” and who, once sequentially fought at least a dozen other ne'er do wells and petty criminals on the New Haven Green in broad daylight before a cheering crowd, only to reveal, when facing his best friend in the final bout, that he had been carrying a can of mace the whole time. Such things are cartoonish, absurd and when written they break the spell of mimesis. Yet it happened.
Watson’s characters, at times, act aware of their own symbolic and thematic motivations. This self-awareness is part of what makes the heightened reality work. But he also often displaces the decisive moment of a story, so the narrator hears it described, or sees only the effects of it, rather than the event itself.
This is why the death of dogs happens unseen, for the most part. Here’s how Lois informs the narrator of Spike’s euthanasia: the narrator, in the process of packing up to leave his house, returns home to find his wife and no dog. He asks Lois where Spike is, she eats a meal without him. The narrator notices her looks in a way he typically does not, signalling to the reader that she has taken some action to alter the symbolic logic of their relationship: “She wore eye makeup, bringing out the depth and what I have only a few times truly recognized as the astonishing beauty of her deep green eyes.” (30). He notices her nails, the table’s fine setting, the meal.
She seemed like someone I’d only now just met, whom I’ve walked in on by her own design. She looked at me, and my heart sank, and the knot that had formed in my chest the night before began to dissolve into sorrow.
“He was getting pretty old,” she said. She took a sip of wine, which was an expensive bottle we’d saved for a special occasion. “I had him put to sleep.” (30)
The narrator goes to live with a couple male friends. They drink. They hang out with dogs. They mostly don’t talk about the collapse of their marriages or their hopes. Sometimes one shoots turtles and snakes.
Later, Lois comes to the farm where the narrator is staying. They go for a walk and have a sexual encounter. Then she tells him how it was to put Spike down. This passage is one of my favorites in Watson’s book, so I’ll just quote the whole thing:
“He laid down his head and closed his eyes,” she said. “And then with my hands on him like that, I tried to pull him back to me. Back to us.” She said, No Spike don’t go. She pleaded with him not to die. The vet was upset and said some words to her and left the room in anger, left her alone in her grief. And when it was over, she had a sense of not knowing where she was for a moment. Sitting on the floor in there alone with the strong smell of flea killer and antiseptic, and the white of the floor and walls and the stainless steel of the examination table where Spike had died and where he lay now, and in that moment he was everything she had ever loved. (34)
Lois tells the narrator she did it to hurt him, without knowing how much it would hurt her, and that this act has put them both beyond the possibility of forgiveness. This conversation marks the end of the narrator’s marriage. Placing it after Spike’s death is necessary considering the point-of-view, but it distributes the real emotional pain and sadomasochism accompanying this breakup more evenly.
The rest of the story has its heightened not-quite-gothic quality: the narrator and his friends shoot snakes, they have dogs with human personalities, they live in a rotting farmhouse. But the sections where the narrator interacts with Lois are more straightforwardly real. This tonal contrast is interesting and productive, I think, because the other sections of the story are clearly working through a different logic, the emotional stakes of the Lois sections are directly communicated and hit harder.
By dissolving the structuring relationship in his life, the narrator casts himself adrift, and after the conversation about Spike’s death, the narrator’s diction gets a little biblical, particularly on the last page: “Oh, slay me and scatter my parts in the field. The house was hell.” (38) A part of him has died with Spike, and he becomes less human, or at least less analytical, more like a dog, “already lost within his own actions, forgetting his last conscious needs.” (38).
There can be no return.
Dog as ambiguous bearer of emotion
In “The Wake,” a woman, Marcia, who has left a man, Sam, ships herself back to Sam in a UPS crate. Marcia tells Sam she shipped herself, rather than just showing up, because it would break the ice a little. Meanwhile, a dog crawls under Sam’s house and dies. Sam digs a hole to bury the dog but does not bury it, Marcia remains in the crate. Some acquaintances come over for dinner, remark on the crate and smell the dead dog. At the end, the acquaintances help Marcia out of the crate and Sam goes to bury the dog.
Here’s how Watson describes the dog and its death and how he describes Marcia and her confinement. Sam finds the dog in front of his house on a cool evening:
Sam could see the dog’s sides shiver as she labored to breathe. Her dark coat was patchy with mange and her eyes looked bad. When Sam walked closer they went to slits and a low growl came from her throat. He could smell her from ten feet away: a ripe, sweet rotten smell. (102)
He calls the pound, but by the time they get there the dog is gone. He hears it yowling that night under his house, he can smell it, but then it falls silent, dead. He hears “wind rattling the dry leaves.”
The next day, UPS delivers a crate. Sam doesn’t know what’s in it but considers using it to bury the dog. After Henry, the delivery worker, has left the crate in the house, Sam “heard the dolly rattle down the steps,” (105). The repetition of rattle links the delivery of the box with the death of the dog. That link is developed further when Marcia, in the box, talks. She is like the dog yowling under the floorboards the night before. Sam knows of her presence by the muffled speech and by the smell, as he knows of the dog’s presence from the smell of its decay and the sound of its cries.
The Marcia-dog parallel continues through the dinner Sam hosts with two co-workers, and reaches a breaking point in the burial of the dog and the liberation of Marcia from the box. Sam has to crawl under his house to retrieve the dog’s corpse:
Her eyes bore fiercely into the beam, black lips curled back from her teeth. Sam’s heart leapt and raced in his chest.
She never moved.
“Oh,” he whispered, eyes welling, “poor thing.” He shut off the light and lay in the dark beside her. Above him, the shuffling sounds of the living were creaky and vague. (118)
Marcia, unseen again, has come out of the box and into life, while Sam and the dog are now concealed in darkness and death. As with the narrator in “Last Days,” Sam does not directly see the dog die, but he does not have someone to relate to him its last moments. Instead of being a simple stand-in for a relationship, the dog is a sort of suppressed, festering grief. Marcia has come back into the house, emerging from darkness and concealment into life.
The dog in “The Wake” is not explicitly contiguous with a woman at the level of symbol; at times Sam and Marcia are both the dying dog. Its ability to move on its own, to choose where to die, and to situate that dying in the dark (subconscious) space of the bourgeois domestic sphere means the dog has autonomy as a symbol. Its death is a living thing, shifting meaning and weight through the story. This symbolic wobble creates the negative space necessary for an ambiguous ending in “The Wake.”
In another story, this ending might not read as ambiguous: Sam would drag the dog out and bury it in a grave he’d dug before Marcia arrived, then go into the light of his house and join the living, the work of his grieving done. But Watson’s stories suspend some of the operations of normality; Marcia shipped herself to Sam. The play of symbols here is fairly explicit, reality is more intense. Does Sam die down there? Does he bury himself? Does he crawl back out without the dog’s corpse and go in and drive the living—co-workers and Marcia both—from his house, content to live in a place permeated by decay and suffering?
This ambiguity of symbolic weight is continued in the final story of the collection, “Kindred Spirits,” which is the immediate successor to “The Wake,” in the text.
Dogs, Hogs and Juleps: A barbecue from Hell.
As mentioned at the start of this essay, “Kindred Spirits,” is the story of several deaths, all either unseen or related to the narrator by another character. A quick summary is in order, since this story’s chronology can be difficult to track: Ten years before the events of the story, the narrator, a lawyer, defends a man for murder. His wife leaves him for the defendant after the trial and later tells him the man confessed to her. In the present day, the lawyer’s friend and client, Bailey, who is divorcing his wife Maryella, hosts a barbecue. The hog cooked at the barbecue was hunted down by two of his friends, Skeet and Titus, one of their dogs was killed for being unsuitable as a hunting dog. Bailey, after Skeet tells the story of the hunt, tells how he discovered his wife’s affair with his business partner, Reid Covert (hahaha). Bailey thrice confronted Reid. The third time, Bailey armed himself with a pistol loaded with wax shot and found Reid and Maryella on the beach near his estate on a lake. In the ensuing fight, Maryella and Reid are both killed. With the help of his servant, Russell, Bailey destroyed the bodies in the firepit later used to prepare the barbecue. At the end of his story, two of Bailey’s dogs, Buddy and Junior, fight for a ball in the lake. Junior drowns Buddy. Bailey shoots at, but misses, Junior and nearly hits his son. Bailey’s friends, save for the narrator, depart and the narrator helps Bailey transfer much of his property to Russell, his servant. Exeunt Russell and family.
“Kindred Spirits” is the most formally complex of Watson’s stories in the collection, and the one in which dogs are used most widely as different symbols. Where the stories in the rest of the collection tend to hinge on one person’s relationship to a dog, or to the role a dog plays in one set of human relationships, “Kindred Spirits” has two dead dogs, another dog that ought to die, several divorces, multiple murders, a dog-as-food joke, and deliberate parallelisms between different individual characters and different dogs that change over the course of the text.
But Watson’s treatment of death, specifically, is of interest to me.
At the barbecue, Skeet relates the story of the hog hunt. His dog has got the hog by its snout, but lets go whenever a person touches the hog. So they have to catch it again, this time the hunters have the hog partway tied without touching it, the dog stares down the man tying the hog: “And that’s when the guy pulls his .44 Redhawk out, cocks it and blows the son of a bitch away.” (133) Again, this is a death that the narrator of the story doesn’t see, though the narrator of the story-within-the-story sees it. The dead dog doesn’t let go, he maintains possession of the hog, his jaws clamped down: “You can imagine the state of mind of the hog right then, that .44 laid down the ridge of his nose and going boom, shooting blue flame, and that dog’s head opening up, blood and brains and bone all over him, dog teeth clamping down even more on his nose.” (134). It’s a visceral passage, quite horrifying. The men deflect from its horror by joking that they might be eating some of the dog mixed in with the hog.
I found it reminiscent of the passages with the fyce in William Faulkner’s novella The Bear. The fyce is described as foolhardy, suited to the hunt but perhaps too well suited. In The Bear, the fyce’s reckless courage draws Isaac McCaslin into direct danger under the bear’s paws, his unsuitability for the work taking his master into a biblical, symbolic dreamland. McCaslin’s fyce is a foil and precursor to the great bear hunter, Lion.
Back in Watson, Skeet’s hunting dog likewise takes the story into new territory, out of the slow, almost cold reflections of the narrator and the bullshitting of the barbecue and into a nightmare frame. In its playful incomprehension, Skeet’s dog is foil to, and precursor of Junior, the idiot dog that drowns its own father. The violence of annihilation in the boar hunting passage shifts this story into the heightened reality Watson employs elsewhere, a blood sacrifice by which to measure the other deaths. The death of the dog and hog gets a page and a half of space, far more than most of the other deaths in Watson’s work.
Subsequent deaths, though they matter much more, are described with greater restraint. Going for the gross out here actually de-emphasizes this death. Other moments of violence, set apart from it, are more singular and shocking. Let’s talk about the next one, Bailey’s double murder of Maryella and Reid Covert.
Skeet’s story makes Bailey want to tell his own story, though it becomes clear that this barbecue is just an elaborate setup for the revelation of Bailey’s crime. His guests know it is a set up for Bailey to tell them the story of his misfortune; they don’t know a murder has happened. The real woe, rather than the bloody excitement of the hunt, lowers the mood. As Bailey talks, Buddy and Junior wrestle over a ball that Bailey’s son, Lee (Ulysses, this story is, I think, Watson’s most self-conscious in the collection), throws for them to catch.
Bailey tells them he confronted Reid. Here the connection between the dead hunting dog and Bailey manifests, as the dog caught the boar and let him go so too did Bailey confront Reid and let him go: “I whipped that sorry sapsucker’s ass three times before I finally got rid of him.” (136). In the last fight, Bailey confronts Reid and Maryella on a beach at night, he fights Reid, then draws a .38 and shoots him five times with wax plugs. Redi faints; Maryella believes him dead. Bailey and Maryella fight in the shallows: “‘And that’s when Reid jumped onto my back, and shoved me forward. I still had a hold on Maryella’s neck, see, and my arms were held out stiff….I felt her neck crack beneath my hands,’ he said. ‘Beneath our weight, mine and Reid’s.’” (That’s it, eight words, and a six word addendum). He drowns Reid. There’s not a neat parallel to the hog hunt, but there’s still that feeling of repeated fighting, of something smart unfit for its purpose, destroying itself in the act of seeking. The dog can’t stop chasing the hog, Bailey can’t stop going after Reid. Reid couldn’t stop going after Bailey’s wife.
There’s a feeling of almost deliberate disbelief among his friends. They know, but they can’t quite face the knowledge, until a further interruption of violence: Junior drowns Buddy in a struggle for the ball: “Junior mounted Buddy from behind, and as he climbed Buddy’s back the older dog, his nose held straight up and the ball still in his teeth, went under.
“He didn’t come back up.” (142). Another quick death hidden from immediate view. Another drowned dog at the moment of realization, for Bailey, for his friends. For the boy, Lee, realization comes a moment later, when his enraged father aims at Junio and fires, nearly shooting Lee, then: “He lowered the barrel and drew a bead on the boy. The boy, and I tell you he looked just like his mother, was looking right into his father’s eyes. He will never be just a boy again.” (143). Bailey fires into the air.
That intervention: “He will never be just a boy again,” is almost too much, a future tense sentence in a past tense story. It is a break with the finality of the obscured violence. No placid sheet of water can hide this, no telling by a narrator can hide the ugly fact of violence, or its imprint on the heart here. I think this is why the narratorial intrusion works in this instance, prior to this moment Watson’s depictions of violence have been brief and matter of fact, or garish and bloody. This more emotional or psychological turn explains Lee’s presence in the story and adds a complicating element to the piece, it has become his coming-of-age.
This story, Watson said in the Norton Q&A, is one of Watson’s most intentionally southern stories: “the last story in the book, “Kindred Spirits,” I wrote thinking about southern things, which is to say southern problems like race, class, history.” Russell, whom I briefly mentioned, is an example of this. Even Russell’s name recalls Richard Brevard Russell Jr, the legislative architect of the Southern aristocracy’s use of the Senate to block Civil Rights reform. Russell, the servant in Watson’s story, is the descendant of enslaved Brazilians reimported to the U.S. as family servants by Bailey’s ex-Confederate ancestors. This story is the closest Watson comes to class parable: the decadence of the Southern gentry, surrounded by the affectations of its wealth: Mint juleps, purpose-bred hunting dogs, names evoking the glories of past defeats.
But it is also more complex than that and offers a possible synthesis of the dog motifs throughout the book. Comparing the final sentence from “Last Days,” with the final sentence of “Kindred Spirits” is instructive.
“Last Days” ends with: “And Ike, too, baying—out on the porch—full-lunged, without memory or sense, with only the barking of Otis to clue his continuing: already lost within his own actions, forgetting his last conscious needs” (38).
“Kindred Spirits” concludes: “I listened to the dying sounds of birds out over the water and in the trees, and the faint clattering of small sharp tusks against steel fencing out in the grove, a sound that seemed to come from my own heart.” (146).
“Last Days,” is a more complex sentence, but shorter and choppier. The dogs here lose their personification and revert to an unconscious animal form, unable to comprehend why or what they’re doing. The narrator and his friends, by parallel construction, are also in a moment of personal disintegration and are losing their humanity. But the critical faculty remains—the last sentence is the narrator’s commentary on the dog’s cognition.
“Kindred Spirits” closing sentence sounds better when spoken aloud; the repeated ‘s’ sounds (fourteen by my subjective count) slip the sentence along, offset occasion by the harsher ‘t’ sound (thirteen by my count). There is action here, the narrator listens to sound and identifies it with his own emotional processes, in this case the penned hogs striking the fence—in despair? To sharpen their tusks? To make themselves heard?—incorporating the natural world into man’s perception.
I think what this juxtaposition and the increasing complexity of the dog symbol across the collection indicates is that, in Watson, the symbol is less than the character. A story that works on a symbolic level is still related through the character. Likewise, while the men in Watson’s collection act like dogs, become dogs to an extent, and lose themselves in their own actions, they always retain the human apparatus, judgment. Their dogginess is self-aware, and the conflation of man with dog is an attempt to escape responsibility for one’s humanity; the dog comparison becomes a means of judgment. Dogs are innocent, but men cannot be as the capacity to perceive innocence indicates a level of comprehension that precludes an innocent existence.
Because so much of the death in Watson’s work is related secondhand, or happens elsewhere, the narrating characters participate in the construction of symbolism. What this offers to an aspiring writer is this: Characters can be aware of symbols in a text, can participate in making them, and, by such participation, alter their own positions within a story.
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*All of these are explained by the fact that the Congress Plaza is both very old and very badly run, a victim of chronic underinvestment and age more than supernatural occupation. Unlubricated metal screams when it slides over itself, as in machined elements of an elevator. 130 years of settling mean no door will fit precisely in its frame, and a lack of proper management may make it more economical to simply close up a damaged room for some period than to fully renovate it. And yet I cannot shake myself of the feeling that there is something badly wrong in the Congress Plaza: Within, walls do not continue upright, bricks meet disorderly, floors are unsteady, and doors swing open freely; silence lays steadily against the wood and stone of the Congress Plaza, and when I walk there, I most surely walk alone.