My husband recently inherited an old Victrola from his maternal grandparents. It’s perfectly maintained; lift the lid and wind the crank and drop the needle on one of the thick records from a yellowed paper sleeve and out come the songs and the voices of the past. It’s magical—or rather, mechanical, which feels strangely similar at this point in history. It’s not digital. It’s not even analog. It’s simply mechanical—a “talking machine,” as the original branding puts it.
Though Grandma Huard carefully packed a number of accompanying records in newspaper for our drive back from Michigan, we’re now on the hunt for more—excited when we find a Sidney Bechet or Coleman Hawkins recording in a mouse-nibbled cardboard box of 78s in a basement record shop.
When I first saw the Victrola, I looked for the “Victor Dog” like I was looking for an old friend, and there he was—the little terrier on the logo, listening intently to “His Master’s Voice.”
The iconic image originated with a painting by English artist Francis Barraud—the dog listening intently to the “voice” emanating from the machine.
Barraud inherited both the little dog, Nipper, and the phonograph from his brother Mark when he died, making the image of the little dog attentive to the voice from beyond particularly poignant.
While the image might be less and less iconic to younger and younger generations, anyone here in Baltimore where I live might recognize scene from passing by the big little dog atop the Maryland Historical Society on the Park Avenue side of the building – one of only two such statues that still remain from atop RCA buildings (the other’s in Albany).
Readers of the poet James Merrill will also associate “The Victor Dog” with his poem of the same name, in which, as Ange Mlinko writes in her “Poem Guide” for the Poetry Foundation, Merrill writes “wittily, poignantly, and resignedly about the philosophical consolation of art, using the RCA Corporation logo of a dog looking confusedly at a phonograph as a comical, metaphysical conceit.” Ange Mlinko’s meditation on the poem is a terrific guide to a text dense with musical and literary allusions and Merrill’s signature formal pyrotechnics (here we have rhymes off proper nouns that will make your head spin—Boulez/plays, Block/rock, Ravel’s/smells, Blanche/flinch, King Lear/near, Jezebel/impossible, Handel/spindle); Mlinko makes sure a reader doesn’t miss the emotion for the erudition, the pathos for the play.
If you come to love the poem, and Merrill, like I do, it’s also well worth paying an online visit to the Washington University Libraries’ James Merrill Digital Archive, which collects 10 pages of drafts from “The Victor Dog” (among other treasures). While prosody and allusions seem to flow onto the page for Merrill, we see that he works at the revelation—the “philosophical consolation of art.”
How to word the last words of this poem sometimes titled, slyly in its drafts, “Doggerel”?
Art is art.
The life we bring to it is a dog’s life.The life we give to it is a dog’s life.
The life they give to it is a dog’s life.
. . . it asks of us is this dogs [sic] life.
I believe in art.
But the life given up to it is a dog’s life.We believe in art.
But a whole life given up to it is a dog’s life.
Interrogatives? Imperatives? Declaratives?
Let him sleep. Turn off the gramophone.
. . . Causing a harmony beyond belief,
Planets and angels—Stop! In Victor’s heart
There’s no rest for the vanquished, who love art.. . . Is there in Victor’s heart
No mercy for all those vanquished by so much art?
And finally, the spinning of revision stops:
The last chord fades. The night is cold and fine.
His master’s voice rasps through the grooves’ bare groves.
Obediently, in silence like the grave’s
He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophoneOnly to dream he is at the première of a Handel
Opera long thought lost—Il Cane Minore.
Its allegorical subject is his story!
A little dog revolving round a spindleGives rise to harmonies beyond belief,
A cast of stars . . . Is there in Victor’s heart
No honey for the vanquished? Art is art.
The life it asks of us is a dog’s life.
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Image citation: Merrill, James. “‘The Victor Dog’ by James Merrill.” WUSTL Digital Gateway Image Collections & Exhibitions, accessed September 14, 2016,
http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/items/show/9938.