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Irving Litvag’s Followers (1)
Irving Litvag
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“He had three great loves, his wife, his dogs, and his home. He wrote about them over and over again. And though literary critics say he was a patently unimportant writer and they probably are right, he accomplished something that very few important writers are able to do: in some ineffable way he transmuted his great loves into the hearts of other people so that they loved them almost as intensely as he did. So that now, long after he has gone, along with his wife, and the dogs, the strange love still remains.”
― The Master of Sunnybank: A Biography of Albert Payson Terhune
― The Master of Sunnybank: A Biography of Albert Payson Terhune
“Just when the first collie came to Sunnybank is not known. But Terhune wrote and told many times how he acquired his own first collie when he was thirteen. He had painfully amassed a savings of $9 and took it to the New York dog pound. There he bought a tricolored collie, which he named Argus.
“I devoted all my out-of-school hours to Argus’s education,” he wrote later. “He learned with bewildering ease, but I learned ten times as much from him as he ever learned from me.”
It was Argus who made Terhune into a collie man – a strange, deep-rooted aberration afflicting collie owners by the score and, eventually, Terhune readers by the thousands. Its major symptom is the passionate, wholly illogical belief that one breed of dog rises regally far above the rest of the barking pack – and that the old Scottish sheep-herding breed whose very name, like its origins, is shrouded in mystery.
Though every breed has its equally impassioned adherents, collie people had the clear advantage, in Terhune, of a trumplet-like spokesman.
He was wont to write things like: “A dog is a dog, but a collie is – a collie. “Or: “…the Sunnybank collies aren’t merely dogs. There a super dogs!”
But much more than such extravagant claims about collies, it was the attributes given to the collies in his stories that had such a powerful effect on his readers. They were wise beyond belief, everlastingly gentle with those where merited such treatment (and the collies always knew), terrifyingly vengeful with those who didn’t. And they were eternally loyal – so loyal that the word itself seems inadequate to describe their fealty.”
― The Master of Sunnybank: A Biography of Albert Payson Terhune
“I devoted all my out-of-school hours to Argus’s education,” he wrote later. “He learned with bewildering ease, but I learned ten times as much from him as he ever learned from me.”
It was Argus who made Terhune into a collie man – a strange, deep-rooted aberration afflicting collie owners by the score and, eventually, Terhune readers by the thousands. Its major symptom is the passionate, wholly illogical belief that one breed of dog rises regally far above the rest of the barking pack – and that the old Scottish sheep-herding breed whose very name, like its origins, is shrouded in mystery.
Though every breed has its equally impassioned adherents, collie people had the clear advantage, in Terhune, of a trumplet-like spokesman.
He was wont to write things like: “A dog is a dog, but a collie is – a collie. “Or: “…the Sunnybank collies aren’t merely dogs. There a super dogs!”
But much more than such extravagant claims about collies, it was the attributes given to the collies in his stories that had such a powerful effect on his readers. They were wise beyond belief, everlastingly gentle with those where merited such treatment (and the collies always knew), terrifyingly vengeful with those who didn’t. And they were eternally loyal – so loyal that the word itself seems inadequate to describe their fealty.”
― The Master of Sunnybank: A Biography of Albert Payson Terhune
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