“The true philosopher is he who has lost his coat but is free from fleas.”

I hadn’t planned to read Flush last night. I blame Dovegrey Reader and her post yesterday, which reminded me it would have been Virginia Woolf’s 128th birthday yesterday. Given that I had already celebrated yesterday’s other famous literary birthday boy on Sunday evening with a Burns Supper, I felt it only right that I tipped my hat to Mrs Woolf. Flush is a mere slip of a thing at a shade over 100 pages, and made for a perfect one-sitting read.

The book is Virginia Woolf’s biography of Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet cocker spaniel. A biography of a dog might not sound like it’s going to be terribly interesting – or at least, I was slightly unsure about it, given my status as an Arch Cat Lady – but I was very, very pleasantly surprised. We follow Flush as he moves from the home of Miss Mitford to Miss Barrett, who is at that point an invalid spending much of her time shut away in a back bedroom in Wimpole Street. It is, in a way, love at first sight on both parts:

“Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? … Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other.”

This immediately flags it up as a love story, with all the component parts of warmth, and jealousy, and drama, as the two protagonists grow older. It is also a piece of writing full of Woolfian stream of consciousness… but the consciousness being streamed is that of a dog.

Woolf has cleverly taken extracts from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s diaries and letters, and tried to imagine the described situations from the perspective of Flush. One of the most affecting sections was when Flush was dog-napped, and we read about Flush’s fear and worry that he’ll never see Miss Barrett again. Of course, Woolf assigns more philosophical insight to Flush than we would perhaps expect a dog to have – such as when he moves to Italy with the newly-married Brownings and we follow his mindset as he throws off the shackles of class and embraces a more democratic outlook on his fellow canines (not to mention an increasingly democratic sex life in the alleys of Florence…) – an implied criticism of London city life perhaps?

But then, who am I to say how much philosophical insight a dog possesses? I do often wonder whether my cats know more than they’re letting on.

Flush understands the nature of love and poetry, which is fitting given who his owner is, but for him it is all in smells. Unmoved by the dramatic landscape of the Apennines, ‘[to] describe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power.’

“Beauty, so it seems at least, had to be crystallized into a green or violet powder and puffed by some celestial syringe down the fringed channels that lay behind his nostrils before it touched Flush’s senses; and then it issued not in words, but in a silent rapture. Where Mrs Browning saw, he smelt; where she wrote, he snuffed.”

Flush is every bit as much a poet as Mrs Browning, it would seem.

Flush isn’t high art, but nor is it simply a folly. It occupies that odd space in between fiction and non-fiction, even more so than her other, more famous, ‘biography’ Orlando. This is based relatively closely on real events, it is simply the mind of Flush that has been created by Woolf’s imagination. Even then, when writing a biography of a human being, even with their utmost collaboration, how much can one ever really know about what someone else is thinking? Perhaps it isn’t so odd after all.

I was quite delighted and charmed by this book, more so than I had really expected – and I say that as a confirmed Woolf fan and as a Cat Person. It felt, too, as if Woolf really enjoyed writing it. There was a warmth and exuberance that just shone from the page. Flush was immediately preceded by The Waves, which was, by all accounts, a draining experience to write. This, then, must have felt like a writer’s holiday, something to have some fun with, from her speculation as to the origins of the Spaniel, to the beautiful passages describing the mutual affection between dog and human. That joy is immediately transferred to the reader, and my, what a treat.